


Immortality

by Neverever



Category: Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616
Genre: Established Relationship, Fear, Hiding Medical Issues, M/M, Medical Experimentation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-17
Updated: 2021-03-17
Packaged: 2021-03-25 16:08:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,958
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30091680
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Neverever/pseuds/Neverever
Summary: Steve's been through stuff. Now he has medical news he's nervous to share with Tony.
Relationships: Steve Rogers/Tony Stark
Comments: 11
Kudos: 131





	Immortality

**Author's Note:**

> Written for LightsOnParkAve Round 19, Immortality.
> 
> Thanks to arms_plutonic for the beta read!

Steve had always been destined to be unmoored in time. 

After a testy and exhausting morning with SHIELD, Steve had a free afternoon. Early afternoon shadows gathered in the living room as Steve put a freshly-made hot cup of coffee on the end table. He’d claimed this corner nook in the Avengers living room when they’d restarted the team a couple of years ago. Brown leather chair in a mission style, with a end table just the right size for all of Steve’s papers and a bright light with a mica shade. A magazine rack had shown up shortly after Steve started sitting there.

Tony was the source. He never admitted it or acknowledged it. Tony was also the reason for the other chair across from Steve’s.

No one sat there because that was Tony’s chair. Everyone knew that as soon as they signed onto the Avengers. 

Too early for Tony to show up before team dinner. Though a little part of Steve really wanted him to. He glanced at the collection of printouts from his SHIELD visit set on top of the end table.

Steve had too much time on his hands for some projects and too little time to work on others. He couldn’t focus on his book. Nice to have the time to read for fun. But each little noise pricked his ears -- the curse was that he could hear a lot -- and he thought maybe it was Tony arriving early to hang with him.

He should have texted Tony to suggest meeting up. But that would have made Tony worry. Is it the team, Cap? Is there an emergency? _Is it us, Steve?_

He couldn’t tell Tony yet. He wasn’t ready to talk, to admit that he was --

The book was solid in Steve’s hands, he could feel the warmth of the room, he could hear the slight whirr of the HVAC in the walls. Steve took a deep breath, trying to center himself, force himself to live in the moment, draw on his deep well of patience.

It didn’t work in the 30s, it wasn’t going to work now. Steve was a patient man, but he was also a man of action who needed to confront all problems head on.

He wasn’t alone in this, though. He had Tony to think of.

Steve could hear the slow tick-tock of the clock his mother had had back in their apartment. He’d heard that soft ticking in the quiet of the kitchen as he struggled to get through his homework. 

“Get your math done, Stevie, and then you can draw,” Sarah would say from her washtub. He heard that loud ticking as he sewed buttons back on shirts that his mother washed while Steve squirmed and shifted in his seat, eager to be set free to play outside. 

Tick-tock and time passed.

He’s known Tony since they were both in their early twenties and, ten years later, they were more than friends. Tony said that they had a lifetime ahead of them.

Steve put the book away and looked thoughtfully at his now empty coffee mug. He wanted more but that would mean getting up and going to the kitchen. He’d see that it’d been barely thirty minutes since he sat down to wait for Tony. Who didn’t know that Steve was waiting for him.

It was better to wait than to ask. That’s how Steve felt. He didn’t want Tony to worry unnecessarily. Not when there were worse things.

The thing about the superhero life was the time travel. God, it made Steve sick at times to shuttle back and forth to the past, to the future, to dystopian alternate timelines that could be stopped from happening if the Avengers just did this one weird thing. He’d traveled to the end of time once and the very idea made his head hurt thinking about it.

If he really wanted to know where Tony was, he could ask the tower AI or call Bambi. 

After dinner, Tony would drag him, not unwillingly, back to their suite and put on a sci-fi movie. “Have you seen this one yet?”

Steve might have, might not have. There was so much to catch up on after eighty years. At the beginning, Tony joked that Steve had more in common with thirteen year olds than people in their 20s since he was starting from the beginning.

It wasn’t the same -- Steve sensed the weight of his missing years when Tony wore a t-shirt with an old meme on it and the rest of the team would laugh and Steve would play along. People expected people in their 20s and 30s to know things, understand what they were talking about, to have common cultural knowledge. 

Steve looked forward to the future, but was too bound up in the past.

Maybe he should text Tony and suggest that they met up in the bedroom. Fucking Tony into the mattress seemed to be a far better option than anything Steve had at the moment.

The shot of air from Steve leaning back into the chair blew some of the printouts off the table and Steve had to get up and retrieve them. No one except for Tony should see them. He could have emailed the pile to Tony; Tony would have preferred that. But Steve needed the tangibility offered by paper, to see Tony’s face as he read the information.

If Tony suggested a movie or a show, Steve prayed it would not be anything with Doctor Who in it. Steve always had a low-grade irritation with it. He told people he didn’t quite know why. But Steve did know. He just didn’t relate to the Doctor -- immortal beings should be different. Thor was, Steve would be.

Thor said he was not immortal. He would say that and give Steve a knowing look. 

Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to. 

Then again, don’t sign up for a secret military project as a test subject for a untested serum. Or enlist in a war where the enemy liked to experiment on captured prisoners. Steve had been captured, always managed to escape, but all it took was that one time.

Eighty years later, two thousand years later, five thousand years and he’d still be paying for all those decisions.

Steve took out a sketchbook to sketch the chair with Tony in it and Tony not in it.

He’d outlive them all. And what would it be like to come home to find that chair across from him empty? 

“Hey, sorry I’m late,” Tony said. 

The grey suit looked great on Tony. And admittedly the open collar with no tie look added something as well, even if it still felt too informal for Steve.

“Late?”

Tony flopped down into his chair, throwing his legs over one of the arms. He waved his hand in the air. “You know, our thing. Check-in before dinner.” Tony checked his phone. “No, wait, I’m early. You’re never here this early in the afternoon. Finally break the danger room?”

“SHIELD physical and test.”

“You don’t have to do that -- I told you. It’s all a smoke screen to poke at you and run secret experiments.”

There’s always a reckoning, Steve presumed. All the weird and horrible stuff that had happened to him during the war was coming home to roost.

Steve drew a shaky breath and reached for the SHIELD printouts.

“Are you okay, Steve?” Tony asked, a look of concern crossing his face. 

Once they became a couple, Tony earned the right to know what was going on with Steve, even if Steve wasn’t all that good at expressing it. He handed the pile over to Tony.

Curiosity stamped on his face, Tony reached for them with his beautiful fingers, marked with white scars from work. Slightly brushing their fingers together as Steve handed papers over gave Steve a tiny bit of grounding and reassurance.

Damn, how much he loved Tony.

“We have lawyers, I want you to know,” Tony said pointedly as he sat up and began to read.

Steve’s life was so entwined with Tony’s that he nearly forgot where he started and Tony began. Like a branch grafted onto a tree to create a new fruit tree, he’d be nothing without Tony. 

And Tony was smart, easily the smartest person Steve knew. He didn’t have to be objective at all about the person he loved. He could see Tony absorb and understand the medical information and data, even if he wasn’t a doctor.

“Steve?” Tony asked, arching an eyebrow as he looked up at Steve. “What the hell?”

“SHIELD found an archive of HYDRA medical experiments. That’s why they called me in -- “

“It’s not the usual super-soldier stuff.”

“Bucky and I were caught in a trap, HYDRA shot me up with something and it’s possible --” Steve took a deep breath. “It’s possible whatever it was made me immortal.”

There, it was out in the open. One of Steve’s darkest secrets.

“Riiiggghttttt,” Tony said.

That wasn’t the answer Steve was expecting. “What?”

“This doesn’t say anything decisive. Some SHIELD scientist reads something from the 40s and finds Steve Rogers is involved doesn’t lead to you being immortal.” Tony shuffled the papers together and put them on the floor. “It’s a bunch of data.”

“Um, maybe a doctor we trust --”

“Okay, this is what we’re going to do. I could use a shower and you could too, so shower in our room, dinner and chocolate cake in bed -- we’ll watch something ridiculously silly --”

“But the data --”

Tony had that horribly pinched look on his face, the one he got all the time when he felt that SHIELD was taking advantage of Steve or when Steve talked about the serum and the war. “So, this SHIELD person, bet they wanted a blood sample. A lot of blood samples.”

“They asked, didn’t get them.”

“Ah, they’ll try anything.” Tony paused momentarily. He leaned towards Steve. “Sweetheart, it will be fine. You could be immortal, you might not be immortal. Whatever it, we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”

“Tony --”

“Steve. We’ve been through so damn much in the past ten years, who knows what the future will bring? More than ten years ago, I had a chest plate and had to plug myself into the wall, then I had the arc reactor, now it’s just the RT. In a hundred years, you could be you and I could be a head in a jar or an AI. The point is -- I’m going to fight to be with you. I build things and who’s to say I can’t build something to be with you?”

Steve felt the tension loosen in his back and stomach. He believed in Tony and he wasn’t about to stop. 

Tony put his hand on Steve’s knee. “Come on, let’s go upstairs -- I can’t hug you when you’re sitting in that chair and I’m here.”

“Tony -- I --”

Tony stood up and walked over to the side of Steve’s chair. He reached down and gently pulled Steve’s head and shoulder against his leg. “Shush your overactive brain. Knowing you, you’ve been thinking about this for hours.”

Drawing comfort from Tony’s warmth, Steve only nodded. He clung to Tony, feeling him as the anchor tying him to the here and now.

“Come on, it’s been a long day for both of us. Let’s just be together tonight and the future can fuck off.”

Steve laughed, the last of his worry slipping away. “You’ve never said that once in your life and meant it.”

“I do now, since I’m keeping you. And if you’re scared about what could happen, then we’ll make our own future instead.”


End file.
